Spalding Gray in His Own Words in And Everything Is Going Fine

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Maybe I should just tell you some of the facts as I remember them, Spalding Gray says a few minutes into And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderberghs fascinating posthumous documentary on the writer/actor/monologist, who apparently jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. Soderbergh, who filmed the monologue Grays Anatomy in 1996, has whittled a 90-minute, first-person portrait out of 120 hours of footage from Grays personal archive, including interviews, films like Anatomy and Jonathan Demmes Swimming to Cambodia, and footage of stage performances dating back to the late 70s. Eschewing traditional documentary devices like intertitles and talking heads allows Gray to tell his own story more or less chronologically, mostly via his own workwhich may be patently unreliable. In one clip, in which he asks his father to fact-check a childhood story hes worked into a performance, the monologist admits, Sometimes I dont know when Im fictionalizing or not. His sad end is never mentioned in Fine, although its obliquely, eerily suggested by certain words (Gray to an interviewer: I like telling the story of life better than living it) and images (the opening frame, from an ancient, highly degraded tape, is of an empty chair, which Gray approaches, trailed by a cloud of ghostly analog artifacts; incidentally/accidentally, Fine functions as a kind of museum tour through the history of dead video formats). Seen as his final monologue, the film is both an invaluable portfolio of his talent, and a tribute rendered in the style of its subject.